SchrodingerZ writes: "The Venus, Steve Jobs' custom-made mega yacht, (valued at 137.5 million dollars), has been impounded in Amsterdam. Philippe Starck, the boat's main designer, had The Venus impounded by debt collectors, after supposedly Starck and his company, Ubik, were paid only 6 million of the 9-million-euro commission. Roelant Klaassen, a lawyer for Ubik, released in a statement that 'These guys [Jobs and Starck] trusted each other, so there wasn't a very detailed contract.' 'The Venus is a floating ode to both Jobs and Starck's minimalist aesthetic. Made entirely out of aluminum, with 40-foot-long floor-to-ceiling windows lining the passenger compartment and seven 27-inch iMacs making up the command center.' The ship was unofficially unveiled in late October, a year after Jobs' death. It now sits dormant in the Port of Amsterdam, until the payment dispute is resolved."

sneakyimp writes: We've seen increasingly creative ways for bad guys to compromise your system like infected pen drives, computers preloaded with malware, mobile phone apps with malware, and a $300 app that can sniff out your encryption keys.
On top of these obvious risks, there are lingering questions about the integrity of common operating systems and cloud computing services. Do Windows, OSX, and linux have security holes? Does Windows supply a backdoor for the U.S. or other governments? Should you really trust your linux multiverse repository? Do Google and Apple data mine your private mobile phone data for private information? Does Ubuntu's sharing of my data with Amazon compromise my privacy? Can the U.S. Government seize your cloud data without a warrant? Can McAfee or Kaspersky really be trusted?
Naturally, the question arises of how to establish and maintain an ironclad workstation or laptop for the purpose of handling sensitive information or doing security research. DARPA has approached the problem by awarding a $21.4M contract to Invincea to create a secure version of Android. What should we do if we don't have $21.4M USD? Is it safe to buy a PC from any manufacturer? Is it even safe to buy individual computer components and assemble one's own machine? Or might the MOBO firmware be compromised?
What steps can one take to insure a truly secure computing environment? Is this even possible? Can anyone recommend a through checklist or suggest best practices?

jotaass writes: In news that are guaranteed to make the Linux gaming community (in particular, but not exclusively) excited, Valve has just announced that the Steam for Linux client Beta is now open to the public. A.deb package is available here. Interesting as well, they are using an empy GitHub repository solely as an issue tracker, open for anyone to submit, edit and track bugs, with no actual code in the repo.

I found Full Spectrum Warrior to be more like a puzzle game. Each level was designed with specific challenges. Move to cover here, flank insurgent there and so on. As you said, a single mistake could be devastating, but unlike sokoban you can recover. Albeit by trudging back to the healing point. I did like that feature, but when I started thinking of the game in that fashion, it sort of lost its appeal.

Maybe the game was more dynamic than that, but for some reason it stopped being interesting for me and I moved on to other games.

Just as a gag, based on a string of comments made on an earlier date about Google vs. Bing, I typed "2^2^2^2" into Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, and Yahoo all provided the correct answer of 65536 (2^(2^(2^2))), while Bing provides 256 (((2^2)^2)^2). That alone makes Bing's search results less reliable than the others, in my opinion.

Ayn Rand fans should be horrified at the outcome here. Here is a businessman who is engaging in pure, free capitalism. Takes a lower quality product and sells it as a higher quality product. The government has no business getting involved in this man's pursuit of making a profit. If they don't like what he has to sell, they can take their business to another capitalist who offers better products and better service. Let the market sort itself out!

If I want to walk a windows user through changing the desktop resolution, it's easy. Good luck doing those in linux.

ssh -X into the machine, and run:

xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

I have no idea why "a low end non power user" would know or care what their display resolution is. Its like complaining that linux is not ready for the desktop because a sterotypical grannie would have a hard time setting up a hard-realtime CNC controller. Who cares?

I don't print much. Didn't even own a printer from 1995 thru 2009. Based on my recent experiences, seems that changing the default printer is much simpler than understanding the concept of even having a default printer, or the concept of being able to print to multiple printers.

This situation highlights the gap between technology and policy. My guess is, that if things don't get completely ignored after this news item falls from focus, then whatever policy changes are implemented will be ponderous and draconian and will not prevent this scenario from recurring.